Prefab Bar Made From Tubs Lights Up the Night

Spotted on Arch Daily, this temporary bar was the winning design for the annualOporto School of Architecture’s bar design competition in Portugal. Diogo Aguiar & Teresa Otto came up with the surprisingly simple but effective idea of building the walls with Ikea tubs and lighting them up with LED lights. The effect is great signage, fun design, and a building you can simply take apart and reuse for more domestic fare.

So before the party crashers holler that this isn’t green let us point a couple of things out. The tubs are a simple, low waste polypropylene plastic (#5)that is particularly easy to recycle. Ikea does not specify how much recycled material is in the manufacture of the tub but there is real cradle-to-cradle potential with this low-toxic material.

For a light weight, high-profile, and lively looking bar this is good prefab design. The Architects website explains “A huge LED net was fixed behind the boxes, allowing the bar to dramatically change its appearance: by day a white abstract and closed volume; and by night a box of changing light following the DJ set.” The students were able to produce it from scratch in less than a week and most of the materials are reusable afterwards. I’ll drink to that.